It appears that Martha is ready to throw down with notorious patent troll Lodsys. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has filed for declaratory judgment against the troll, seeking a ruling which not only finds MSLO’s electronic magazines to not infringe upon Lodsys’ patents, but that the patents themselves are invalid.

On hearing about this, I immediately thought of the line from the cult classic film “The Princess Bride”, in which the villain declares: “You just made the second classic blunder! This first, of course, is never become involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well know: ‘Never go head to head with [Martha Stewart]…’ “

London is the grandfather of economic excess and perhaps an appropriate role model for New York and San Francisco, the new Babylons of the post-millennial world. It is hard to escape the presence of money — fancy super cars, fancier homes and fancy financiers — where the stench of excess is masked by the sweet scent of success. Except for one small difference — New York (aka Wall Street) and San Francisco do one thing better than London: branding money.

Actually, money — whether it is in Bogota or Bombay (Mumbai, if you insist) or Boston — is just money. Borrowing it, investing it or generally rolling around in a bed made of $100 bills is pretty much the same experience regardless of the source or geography of money. Except, somehow, some kinds of “money” are better than other kinds of “money.”

Google(s goog) is looking to cultivate innovation in some of the more obscure tech markets in the North America. It announced on Wednesday a program that would expand Google’s community ties and outreach in seven large tech hub co-working facilities in the U.S. and Canada.

Chicago, Denver and Waterloo, Canada, aren’t exactly tech backwaters, but they aren’t Silicon Valley, San Francisco or New York City either. In some cases — such as Motorola’s hometown Chicago — Google already has a major presence in these cities. But the idea is for Google to have a more direct involvement in the working facilities, accelerators and incubators that are seeding these cities’ nascent startup scenes.

We started Google for Entrepreneurs to help foster entrepreneurship in communities around the world. Through our work in more than 100 countries, we’ve been incredibly impressed with the catalyzing impact…

With the recent release of the iPhone 5s, a new privacy concern comes hand-in-hand with the new device. One of the features being debuted with the iPhone 5s is Apple’s Touch ID, which allows the iPhone user to, among other things, unlock their phone with their finger print, using an embedded fingerprint reader in the phone.

Although fingerprint readers in electronic devices is not a new thing, by any means, Touch ID appears to be among the first (if not the first) incorporation of this technology into an always connected mobile device. The concern with this new combination of technologies is over how the individual’s biometric data will be saved, who will have access to it, and how this may affect user’s privacy. These are questions which, based on the limited information which Apple has released about precisely how Touch ID works, remain unanswered.

It appears that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is publicly taking the position that medical records provided to pharmacists are not private and can be obtained by the DEA without the need to show cause for the production of such records.

This position, while not specifically constituting new law, has also not received serious challenge in the Courts as of yet. Pending such a challenge the DEA continues to seek and obtain such medical records from pharmacies by way of subpoenas which require no advanced finding of probably cause.

It does appear, however, that the ACLU is preparing to step up to the plate to challenge this practice. How such a challenge shakes out in the end may have a profound impact on the privacy of individual’s medical records, unless Congress steps into the fray to either explicitly uphold the privacy of such medical records or to explicitly limit or eliminate any expectation of privacy in individual medical records.